


Diary of the Depressed

by thewayshefell



Category: Personal - Fandom
Genre: Anorexia, Depression, Diary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-01-22 19:41:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12489380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewayshefell/pseuds/thewayshefell
Summary: The words of a Depressed Person that hope to be turned into a book one day. I want to help people better understand mental illness and what goes through someones head when they are depressed. Sometimes it is hard for those who do not have depression to actually understand what someone who has depression is feeling and I am hoping that this might be able to provide them with a little bit of insight.





	1. The Laundry Room at Work

I have thoughts sometimes about just stopping. What does it matter? I want to walk to the ocean and just swim into the sea until it's dark and all that is pulling me forward is the moon and the waves. I want to swim until I'm tired and miles and miles out. Until my arms are so sore that they can't Possibly do another stroke. Then I want to just sink into the darkness and give up my last breathe.  
A friend once told me I'm poetic and I guess it's hard not to be when all your thoughts end the same, I figured why not coat them in yellow paint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The yellow paint in this refers to how Vincent Van Gogh would eat yellow paint so he could make his insides bright and yellow and become less sad.


	2. Flicker

There is a feeling in the middle of my chest right over my heart, of longing and sadness. I want to reach and and grab it, to be able to pull it out so I don't have to feel it anymore. To perform open heart surgery on myself. Peel off layers of skin and flesh, to crack the ribs protecting my heart and to grab it. It fells like loneliness. It is a hard feeling to describe but I can hear it in a persons voice, the words they use, and the way they carry themselves. It is like looking in a mirror.

Sometimes someone else's loneliness will set off my own, I see the look in there eye and then it become the look in my eye. I feel wrong in those moments, like I robbed someone of their right to mourn because now I am. I have no right to feel something because someone else is but I take it anyways.

I just want this feeling to stop. Sometime I get it when I am sitting with all my friends in their living room. I think to myself, "what right do I have to be here." Most of the time I cannot come up with an answer. In those moments the lonely feeling amplifies to the point where I don't even want to have the persuasion of a surgeon and I just want to take a knife and shove it between my rib-cages.

What I would give to get rid of my loneliness. My tears, my heart, my last breathe. Why won't anybody notice that I'm drowning, why am I not worth enough to care.


	3. Vincent Van Gogh

     Vincent Van Gogh is really something. His work is truly beautiful but he also makes me sad. I saw this short film and it was Van Gogh in a gallery filled with his work. There are a ton of people there who are complimenting his work and saying how much he means to them and you just see Van Gogh standing there, looking, with tears in his eyes. He died unsuccessful, nobody realized his talent or even cared about him until after he died. He was so sad and needed help and no one helped him. Am I going to be like him? Will no one care about me till I am dead?  
It is thought that Van Gogh killed himself. After years of suffer from depression he finally decided he couldn't handle it. He couldn't be unsuccessful and sad and still continue living, so he killed himself. Now, over a hundred years later we still talk about him and appreciate his work. But he never knew that, he wasn't able to see what he had become, am I going to be Van Gogh? Will no one care until I am already dead? Would it even matter, I am not special, I have no extraordinary talent. Vincent Van Gogh was so depressed he killed himself and we still talk about him, yet there over 30,000 people who commit suicide and are forgotten. I am just as unforgettable as them.

  
     Van Gogh was special after death, at least in that way he is still alive, I wish he could have a chance to see what he became. Maybe it would have given him some peace in his death. I hope that one day someone wishes me the same.

 

* * *

 

 

     I spoke with my father today about Vincent Van Gogh. About how he was something so special and not just because of his artwork. His struggle with depression and other mental illness and how he is still relevant so long after his death. I spoke of how I will never have that, after I die I will be irrelevant, no one is going to remember me. He told me that is the same for everyone, he was not afraid of that. People may not know him by name but he will still have a legacy.

      “In a few hundred years from now no one may know my name but someone is going to know something that there great great great grandpa Paul learned from scout master Mark, and that will be my legacy, that’s how I will be remembered.”

     I have not lived long enough to have such an effect on someone’s life, and I do not think I will live long enough to have that effect. I am 22 but I cannot imagine myself living much older than I am now. When I think of my future it only goes to early 30s at best. I will not have a legacy because I barely have a life. I wanted to tell my father this so I quietly said, “what if I don’t live past 25, and I am too young to have a legacy now.”

     My father agreed that I was too young but did not acknowledge the first part of that sentence thinking it was just a joke. It is not, I do not see the point in living if we are all too just die, forgotten, not helping anyone or leaving anything behind.

    When I die no one will remember me and that offers a piece of comfort. My death will be meaningless just like my life. In the moments that those thoughts come in and crowd my being. When all the thoughts in my head yelling and whispering to me that it is meaningless, that there is no point to continue going, I remind myself of the people who cannot go anymore. I remind myself that I still think of them and they are still alive in this universe. I think about the impact they have now, after they died, after they have been dead for years. I think about the people surrounding dead and the people surrounding the ones left alive.

     I think of a girl who died in high school, Katie, she was a year younger than me and was in an ATV accident. She fell off and she was not wearing a helmet. She was in a coma for 2 days before her father took her off life support. I still remember her, she was so kind, she wanted to do so much, and she died at 14. She did not leave any grand master piece behind, she just left. But I still remember her, how kind she was, how she always made a point to talk to everyone and be their friend. One of her best friends recently had a kid, Katie. She is living on even though she is gone, and not all the world know about her but someone does, and so she lives.

    I think about a girl I knew whose best friend committed suicide. He hung himself in a tree in a field when they were 12. It has been 11 years now and she still does not go anywhere on his birthday. She’s crippled with sadness when the anniversary of his death comes around. She still flinches when she hears his name, and has read his letter thousands of times. He may not have been as popular as Vincent Van Gogh but I know his name and I have never meet him. He has a legacy from a person he has never meet. He is the boy that continues to make my friend cry. He is the boy that needed help and did not receive any. He is the boy that was not saved.

    With these thoughts the deceased are able to be a bit like Vincent Van Gogh in the way that they have yet to be forgotten. They are also better than Van Gogh because they did not leave behind a master piece to create there legacy. They left behind pieces of their souls and put them in every person that they have come in contact with. Those people in turn but them in other people. This is what my father was talking about when he said he had a legacy. They may not remember his name but they will carry a piece of his soul when he is long dead.


	4. A Bridge

I am trying to be more honest, with myself and others. I do not like feeling weak and powerless. I do not like when other people can possibly have the upper hand. I do not like relying on other people. When I need other people to do something and I am unable to do it for myself I feel weak and in their debt. That is one of the reasons it is so hard for me to ask for help. As much as I would like to put this off on other people and state that it is because other people did something to make me feel this way, this is one hundred percent my own character flaw. I am sure that sine if my issues have to do with my parents, siblings, close friends, but this issue is all me.

I do not want to give someone the ability to have control over me, I do not want someone to have something they can hold over me. I like to be control of my own life and when I do not have control it creates a stressor. For me this is not a good thing, some people turn into diamonds when pressed and I turn into ash. When I cannot handle something myself I figure other ways to gain control back. That can come with the amount of word I speak, the amount of sleep I sleep, or the amount of calories I consume.

When I am depressed, I feel out of control, so I turn to things I can change. I sleep more, eat less, and try my best not to cry in front of others. This does not allows work, and even when it does it is not a healthy copping mechanism. I realized recently that another way to gain control is to let someone in, but on your terms. Telling someone "I am not having a good" allows for you to have control of who knows how you are feeling instead of people guessing. Stating that "I do not like this because it makes me feel weak" is strangely empowering. There are people who can handle you at your worst, and you need to trust them, which is hard.

Even knowing that, there are something’s I cannot say to people. Being weak in front of people who always make me feel like I could be better is not something I can do. I am not that good, even on a good day. Always being pressured to do better, be better, it is hard to not meet those expectations but I always fall short. I cannot do better when I am struggling to get out of bed in the morning. I cannot be better when the only thing I want to be is dead. It is hard to open up when you are constantly being pressured to be something, someone, you cannot be. 

            Do not tell me I gave to find a way to get up in the morning and then offer no advice. You may know the struggle and you may know me but you do not know my struggle. Everyone’s severity of depression is different, it comes in goes at different times with different feelings.

            I told Brooklin that I do not like the fact that she has to take me to work, it makes me feel compromised in our friendship. She did not say anything until later, then she said “don’t worry about it, you are paying me to take you there, this is a transaction.” This is an answer to a question I did not think to ask. It is her helping out a friend, sure, but it is also something else, a transaction. I usually don’t have “transactions” with friends, I have favors. I know this is an inconvenience for her and I worry about it becoming such an inconvenience that it would be more convenient for her to not be my friend anymore. For someone who does not get along with their family, friends are as essential as oxygen. I do not know how to convey this to her without sounding whiny or over bearing, she told me not to worry about it.

I do not know how long I will continue worrying about it, but it is unlikely that I will bring it up again. I do not want to inconvenience her any further than I already have. I told her “I will try not to worry, I don’t think it will work but I am a pro at suppressing my emotions so no worries.” We laughed. Who wants to deal with other people’s problems when you have your own? Who wants to deal with me when it is easier not too.

I was once described as bubbly, but I haven’t seen that personality trait in a long time. I relayed to a friend that someone that I had a bubbly personality and she said “you do, ya know, when you don’t want to kill yourself.” It was easy then to laugh because it is true, I miss the person I use to be, but so do other people. I am no longer the person I was and I am not what they signed on for. I am not the person they befriended. So why keep being my friend when I have nothing to give to this friendship anymore.


	5. Bubbly

     I am described as bubbly, that is of course “when [I] don’t want to kill [myself],” as described by a close friend. This statement was not said with any malicious intent and was just answering my question of “What word(s) would you use to describe me?” This has stuck with me for 2 reasons. The first being is I have never seen myself as bubbly, I did not think I had one of those personalities, I just talked a lot and wanted to get to know anyone who would listen. The second being that my depression changed who I was so much that someone could comment on it and that it was also so much a part of my personality that it could describe me. I guess that’s three reasons but the only reason I came to the conclusion of the third is because of the second reason.

 

     As I am writing this I noticed that I spend a lot of time thinking about myself in a negative way. I, personally, would have never thought of the adjective bubbly to describe me, talkative, intrusive, overbearing, - yes, those describe me well. Bubbly is somewhat of a foreign concept to me. Just because I would not describe myself as that it does not mean I am not it, someone who knows me well and loves me sees all these good things in me and I need to work on doing that myself, I am working on doing that myself. This is not just those with depression, though it does tend to be worse with them, you are not always what you think you are. There are wonderful adjective that can be used to describe you and if you can’t think of any ask someone who loves you for some. Think of someone you love and try to find similarities between yourself and the good things about them that you like.

     Sometimes we get stuck in our thoughts and it feels sort of like drowning. “I am a terrible person.” “I talk to much I need to shut up and let other people talk more.” “I don’t deserve friends like this, they are too nice/good/smart for me, all I’ll do is drag them down.” And my own personal favorite (so much sarcasm) “They did not sign up for this, they wanted a happy friend who they can count on and do things with not someone who cries at the stupidest thing and is always sad. They did not sign up for me.”

     Thoughts like this are common, almost daily for me. I get terrified of friends drifting away from me but at the same time I can’t bring myself to do anything about it. Apart of me thinks they are better off without me but I am a social creation and I need human interaction so the rest of me thinks I am just being selfish. How can I say that they are too good for me and still want to be their friend. Why can’t I put what they should be getting first, I am not a good friend, I don’t deserve them, they can do better than me.

 

     When I first noticed my mood would change without any active reason I was terrified. Growing up with a mother who was bipolar shaped me a lot and made me never want to be like that. When I got so sad that I lost hope, when I didn’t want to get out of bed, when I couldn’t bring myself to wake up after sleeping for 16 hours, I was terrified. Something was wrong, I had my suspensions but if I was right I couldn’t just fix it like a cut or mosquito bite. A lot of therapists (good therapists) will tell you medicine helps but it doesn’t heal and becomes less effective after time. Depression is a problem in the brain. Your chemical balance is being thrown off and stitching it up isn’t going to fix it.

     Having depression be a part of my personality makes me really sad and upset. I do not want it to be, I wish with all my might that it wouldn’t be but you can’t just wish away illnesses. I am trying to find a way to accept this about myself but it is so hard and I think part of the reason is the stigma society and myself hold against it. Depression is seen as an end all be all, you will always have it so what’s the point. I feel like it should be seen more as a broken bone, it is going to take a long time to heal, you will need therapy, and they will still be scaring but you can get better. It may act up on certain days just like old bullet wounds can still feel the pain sometimes but you can get better. I want to change the way depression is viewed. I want everyone to think that you can get better. A lot of the time it doesn’t feel like you can get better, that you will always be stuck in this cycle but that is not true. You can get better.

     There are two parts to my mind, the personal part, that is me and the way I feel and the objective part, the one that listens to reason and know plausibly what people are feeling and how something will turn out. Not everybody has this and I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Objectively, I know all my friends don’t hate me but personally I feel like they do even though they have given me no reason once so ever for me to feel this way. This is the worst for me because I know I am being stupid. I know that they don’t feel that way but I cannot help it, it is just there and I cannot make it go away. I know other people with social disorders feel this way too.

     I was talking with my parents the other day and I said that something gave me anxiety, because and even explained why it was giving me anxiety. My father told me it was stupid to be anxious over this and I know it was stupid, but I could not help but to feel anxious. We cannot always control the way our emotions work objectively I know it is stupid but I still feel this way.


End file.
